SUMMARY Hung Process

Ira Childress (irac@comdata.com)
Fri, 06 Jun 1997 09:30:46 -0500

> My original post was:
> I think I know what the answer is, but just by chance maybe some else has
> figured out a work around. Here's the problem: I have a process that is
> hung (ufsdump) and is now owned by INIT (pid=1). I cannot kill the
> process and a kill -HUP 1 doesn't clear it either.
>
> Is there a way to terminate the process short of rebooting the machine,
> which is not an option anytime this month. Not being able to backup
> the system is not an option either. Ah yes, the ol' rock and a hard
> place.

Many thanks to:

wbmoore@fedex.com
jayl@latticesemi.com
brion@dia.stata.ma.us
amonf@SubaruSparcDev.subaru1.com
bobw@filmworks.com
bchievers@karoshi.mitretek.org
Glenn.Satchell@Uniq.com.au
gibian@stars1.hanscom.af.mil
and any others I may have left off (sorry).

The "Golden Sun" award goes to Walter Moore (wbmoore@fedex.com) for a most
innovative solution. Walter's suggestion, assuming that kill -9 doesn't
work, was to change the SCSI ID on the tape drive and run drvconfig and
tapes. He suggested trying this with the unit turned off and doing a
kill -9, but the process still didn't die. Chaning the SCSI ID does work
and I was able to get the backup processes going again.

Jay Lessert (jayl@latticesemi.com) suggested running truss -p on the ufsdump
pid. I did and this confirmed that the process was completely defunct and
was not responding to any signals.

Many thanks to all.

Ira

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